Extracting business rules from legacy systems into reusable components

Companies follow the business rules to conduct their businesses daily where the business rules are often implemented into the software systems. Over time, business rules evolve and the software that implemented the business rules is also modified to respond to the new business requirements. Unfortunately, timely updates on the documents corresponding to the software are usually ignored. The documents gradually become outdated and less useful for reference. In this paper, we present a method for identifying and extracting business rules from legacy code by means of data identification and program slicing. The extracted code corresponding to a business rule is then compiled into a component for interoperability where the component is built conforming to a protocol. The components abiding by the protocol can communicate with each other seamlessly in a heterogeneous object-oriented computing environment